A note from the creator of this website

I've always loved horses.  Even at the age of four, I can recall strolling slowly past pastures of grazing horses and feeling a sense of completeness that I felt nowhere else.  Funds were tight in our family and we didn't have the money to buy a horse, so I collected a few models, drew horses, read about them, and studied them endlessly.

I discovered Man o' War when I was around 11 or 12 years old, thanks to the help of our sympathetic school librarian.  The horse has been a passion of mine ever since.  That life-changing event came in the form of a book, Walter Farley's novelization of the life of "Big Red".  I learned how to look up reference material in our local libraries because of Man o' War.  My father showed me how, and I can still remember the thrill of reading newspaper accounts of the races, written by people who had seen his career unfold before their eyes.

Little did I dream that someday I'd be collecting those vintage newspapers.

I've also collected books written by horsemen of the era, Racing Form digests which gave the results of every race in early 1919, and old programs, listing Man o' War on the "eligible" lists.  Both Man o' War's owner and breeder left impressive estates behind them.  I've got the auction catalogs which lists each item.  My pride of the collection, however, has to be one of Man o' War's  horseshoes, originally belonging to his trainer, Louis Feustel.  Feustel kept it as a souvenir of the Man o' War / Sir Barton match race.  It eventually made it's way to exercise rider Jim Gaffney, a member of the Secretariat entourage, in a trade around the time that wonderful horse won the Triple Crown.  Years ago Jim sold the Man o' War horseshoe, and so it came to me.

Some day I hope to get back to collecting.  Meanwhile, I'll spend my time reading about him.